Who is Katy Faust and why is everyone talking about her?

That’s the question many around Australia today after a fiery episode of Q&A in which Katy Faust sent social media in a spin.

Katy Faust is best known for her work campaigning against same sex marriage – despite being the child of same sex parents.

Faust was raised by lesbian mothers and seems to have a bit of a chip on her shoulder about it, despite describing her mother as a “loving gay parent”. And she recently touched down in Australia to spread her… message.

Faust told Tony Jones on Lateline that her mum was “a fantastic mother and most of what I do well as a parent is because that’s how she parented me.

“But she can’t be a father. Her partner, an incredible woman, both of these women have my heart, cannot be a father either.”

Thing is, Faust has a father. Her father reportedly went off with other women following his divorce from Faust’s mother, and Faust’s mother went on to form a stable and loving relationship with a woman.

It seems Faust doesn’t have much of a relationship with her dad — but surely that has nothing to do with gay marriage and everything to do with his performance as a father? One would think.

Jones asked whether Christianity had coloured her views on the topic and Faust replied that she became a born-again Christian in high school, but she describes her argument as “secular and well-founded.”

Watch Faust speak about her views on Lateline with Tony Jones… Post continues after video.

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Faust is the co-author of a Supreme Court amicus brief in favor of allowing states in the US to affirm marriage as the union of one man and one woman in their laws.

In her presentation to the Supreme Court, she writes that: “Regardless of how the child finds her way into a same-sex headed household — death of a parent, divorce, abandonment, or third-party reproduction — trauma will play a role in the child’s life.”

This may be over simplifying things, but it seems to me that Katy Faust’s problem isn’t with gay marriage, it’s with her relationship with her father.

Is Faust projecting her own feelings of abandonment onto the issue of gay marriage and confusing the two?

Faust at an anti gay marriage march.

“Institutionalizing same-sex marriage will encourage more adults to create families where either mother or father are excluded, and thus necessitate loss for the child of that union,” the Supreme Court brief continues.

“Therein a child will lose not only a relationship with at least one biological parent, which all children crave, but the critical dual-gender influence in their daily life as well. Two loving women cannot replace a missing father.”

Faust runs a blog called Ask the Bigot, on which is basically one big pearl-clutching “Won’t someone think of the children?!”

She’s deeply concerned for the Kardashian/Jenner “kids”, the youngest of whom is 18.

“If you listen carefully you can hear the collective crack of ulna’s [sic] breaking as the self-congratulatory crowd pats themselves on the back over their Tolerance and Acceptance of the transgendered. Big Media, cultural elites, and gollygeewillikers even the White House are falling all over themselves to swoon over Mister Bruce Jenner and his “transition” to womanhood. Some of the adjectives bandied about describing his coming out include “Brave” and “Courageous”, but all I see is a man lifting a life-long burden from his shoulders and placing it squarely (pun intended) on his children.”

She also relates a story in which she enlightens a lesbian couple (while holding a sign that read “A CHILD needs a MOTHER and a FATHER”).

Her: “Are you fighting against equality?!?” she said edgily, invading my personal bubble.

Me: “No, I’m fighting for the rights of children to be in relationship with both their mother and father.”

Her: “But you’re against gay marriage, right?”

Me: “Yes, because it promotes fatherless and motherless households.”

Her: “Lots of kids don’t have that. I grew up without a dad and I did fine.”

Me: (Full stop. Mentally on my knees – Oh Lord, help me be sensitive to this woman. What do you want me to say to that?)

“How did that go for you?” I asked, with as much softness as I could muster and still be heard. “Most kids long for their missing father.”

Here she paused, but only for a moment. “I just decided that I was probably better off because he wouldn’t have been a good father.” (Interpretation: she spent a lot of time thinking/longing/wondering about that before she came to the self-protecting conclusion that did not involve her father’s rejection which would have been entirely too painful to bear because that relationship actually mattered a great deal to her).

Last night on Q&A, Faust told audience members, including many gay parents and their children, why their families are wrong.

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“We don’t want to inflict intentional motherless and fatherlessness on kids in the name of progress,” Faust said of her opposition to gay marriage.

‘In [my] country, we didn’t have a robust debate… It was so demonised from the beginning that anybody that supported traditional marriage was doing so based on bias or bigotry or hatred or homophobia. It totally shut it down and people felt like they could not speak up.”

Her statements about “natural law” and then need of a child to have both a mother and a father were too much for Greens leader Richard Di Natale and Labor Senator Sam Dastyari.

“I find it very hard to respect your views because I don’t think it [sic] comes from a place of love, I think it comes from a place of hate,” Senator Dastyari said.

“I worry that so much of your view comes from not really with an issue of marriage, but an issue with homosexuality. You have described it as a lifestyle. You have said homosexuality drives us further away from God.

“I’m sorry, but I think this American evangelical clap-trap is the last thing we need in our debate.”

Her face… her face says it all.

Di Natale noted that Faust was confusing the issue of gay marriage with parenting, and that studies show children raised in loving households thrive, regardless of the sex of their parents.

Amen, Di Natale.

Fausts Supreme Court bid in the US failed. We hope that, in time, Australia won’t give visitors like her a platform to preach her views.